mikeokner

Location: St. Louis

Remote: Willing (some travel OK too)

Relocate: No

Technologies: AWS (SA Pro), Go, Python, JS, Scala, Linux, Postgres, Dynamo, Cassandra, Redis, Terraform, Ansible

Email: michael (at) okner (dot) com

Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeokner/ (full PDF available via email)

I have substantial experience architecting and building modern, cloud-native applications and leading a remote team. I currently oversee the platforms used by thousands of developers & scientists at a Global 250 in a SRE/Architect role. I am most interested in roles that involve leadership & development of technical/software products.

That’s sort of the vision I have for https://www.naverator.com/. Make planning the actual specifics of a particular trip easier, but also make it easier to discover and share ideas with others both within the site and on other platforms.

You're right, it is all manual for now. I do like the idea of some sort of import, but it's intended for a more general audience. I'm not sure my mom would figure out how to create and then import a CSV.

Neat project! If anyone's interested in more of a full-featured web app for travel planning, I've been working on developing https://www.naverator.com/

The ability to take the feedback and double down in just a few days is motivational.

Maybe. I took it slightly differently. They received negative feedback after a 10 minute pitch, and immediately dropped everything to change their product & strategy to appease a potential investor.

Was monetizing in this manner at this moment the right strategy for them? That's a pivotal decision to make and not one I'd throw together at 2 am to try impress a party with no skin in the game.

It's all done through AWS Cognito so it's something I got working with the default code-based method and then moved on to other things. I'll look at reprioritizing a confirmation link to smooth that process.

I do care somewhat about confirming accounts in general just because it cuts down on spam/abuse, and it ensures someone didn't fat-finger their email and then can't regain access when they forget their password in a month. Also, I have on the roadmap a feature for configurable reminders/notifications, and services like AWS SES track bounces. Too many invalid recipients and you run the risk of getting throttled or suspended.

I mentioned in another comment that I've been working on something targeted more at the personal vacation space: https://www.naverator.com

TripIt is good for business travelers and works for personal, but it's very utilitarian. I definitely see space in the market for something more visual & pleasure-oriented.

Seems like as good a time as any to Show HN (or shamelessly plug my side-hustle, depending on how you look at it):

https://www.naverator.com

It's a trip organizer/sharing platform that aims to be the place for you to collect all the various bits of information & reservations & such for your trip. Currently web-only but mobile on the roadmap as well as offline/export functionality which was one of the nice features of Google Trips.

Feedback welcome. I know it's still a little rough around the edges. Hoping to have things buttoned up nicely in another week or two and then start advertising it more officially to everyday folks.

Really cool! I love simple solutions like this.

Don't think of it as a call for a quote, think of it as an initial sales contact. An unsolicited inbound phone inquiry is about the strongest possible lead you can possibly get. The potential customer typically won't expect you to provide a full quote on the spot, but will expect to have a brief conversation and either a follow-up email with pricing details or a follow-up formal sales/demo call scheduled.

In terms of pricing/value, you should already have estimates of value for different customer sizes/use-cases and put together prices based on those estimates. On the call, it's your job to learn as much as you can about their problem so that you can determine how best to solve it with the products you offer and where it falls on your pricing scale.

Don't do on-prem unless they pay you a boat-load more and SaaS isn't an option they're willing to consider. It's way more of a headache.

NDAs are usually fine, but better to pay a lawyer a couple bucks to throw together one for you and try and use that one all the time rather than having to review a bunch of different ones coming from other companies.

Travel is case-by-case. Definitely not necessary for just a quote, and not strictly necessary for sales if your video demos/sales calls are on point, especially if your customers are tech-inclined.

You should not start charging double to existing customers (which is why Stripe doesn't allow you to edit existing plans).

You should keep them on a grandfathered plan for at least a period of time and/or nag them to upgrade (optionally with a discount for their trouble).

Essentially, I come up with a new tactic to motivate myself every couple of months. If I don't do so, I find myself struggling to meet my goals and distracted.

How often do you think about your goals? How important are they to you?

I was in your shoes for a long time, and the way I got past it was to think consciously about the end-result on a regular basis.

Do you want to skate by on your niche skills and watch as other harder workers get the bigger/better contracts from your contacts in the future?

Do you want to passively step through the motions of life and regret not trying to start that business when you're 60?

Do you want to look back and wish you had learned & built more instead of drinking beer and playing COD?

At the end of the day, you are 100% responsible for your own decisions and path in life. You aren't going to be able to artificially motivate yourself forever (as you are discovering). You have to find something that truly motivates you.

I would personally discourage you from incorporating as a Delaware C corp unless you absolutely have no other option. On top of the registered-agent fees, Delaware charges a minimum of about $700/year in taxes. For a company with no revenue, no liability, and no investors, it's extremely expensive and offers no benefit over any other corporate entity registered elsewhere.

You're probably far better off filing for something like a Wyoming LLC[0] for about $150 initially and $75/year after that (if an LLC will work for you internationally).

I'm not an accountant or attorney and I strongly suggest paying one for at least an hour of their time to get some professional advice.

We don't solve problems, but we create some amazing products that people want.

Sure sounds like you're solving someone's problem ;)

You have to find a broker that will sell them to you. Usually these things aren't vanilla options, they're some sort of quasi-option derivative.

It's tricky for interviewers because a lot of candidates claim to be "senior" yet can't even solve fizzbuzz on a whiteboard. Look for jobs with "Lead" or "Architect" in the title, but beyond that, expect that you'll have to go through some sort of stupid process as a bullshit screen.

2017 was a pustule of a year, politically and personally; the general anxiety around the degradation of American democracy made it hard to get much done.

If you're the type of person to make excuses for your lack of personal achievement due to the Twitter ramblings of politicians, then I have news for you: you're never going to be successful.

Totally uninformed comment. Signal the app relies on centralized servers to route messages & discover contacts. Signal the protocol (which is what Skype is rolling out) is a messaging encryption library that encrypts messages on the client using the other client's public key. Central servers (and anyone else in between the two clients) only sees encrypted gibberish, never plain text.

I was right there with you for a long time, but the touchpads on PC flagships have largely caught up. I switch between a Dell XPS 15 and a late-model MBP daily, and while I still give a slight edge to the mac, the Dell works well too and doesn't cause any frustration/pining.

That's coming from the client because the client has received a new public key with which to encrypt messages.

Looks like someone with a lot of money watched the third Matrix film and thought "I want one of those suits."

Cool, is there a way to use it to dynamically generate data (for streaming)? Would be nice to be able to just call something like .next() and get another record so a simulator can run for an indefinite period of time.

Yeah I find it strange that publishers & such bother to release AMP versions of their sites but then opt to keep their crappy, bloated versions around as the default.

Google should just more explicitly rank pages based on load times and incentivize sites to fix their crap.

Congrats to the team! I love that this project has been so successful. My M5510 DE has been my daily driver for almost two years now.

A $60 price in 2021 is about 7% growth per year which is about average for the market as a whole over the past 50ish years, but significantly lower than current market growth and especially current tech sector growth. Still, it looks pretty terrible as CEO to be dumping every last share you're allowed to.

While attacks like that are absolutely a massive and terrible problem, I think that problem is orthogonal to my original question. Those victims are also tallied under general violent crime and murder statistics. When trying to determine whether legal gun ownership is a net positive or negative to society by comparing stats across states, it makes more sense to compare general rates. Presumably gun deaths will be lower in states where it's very hard to legally get access to a gun. But does that matter if far more people are being murdered overall in those states even with mass shootings occurring in gun-friendly places like FL & NV? Chicago sees more people shot and more people murdered each month than any single mass shooting.

"Gun deaths" always seems like a silly metric to me. Who cares if you're killed with a gun instead of a knife or baseball bat or whatever else? Why not just compare murder rates?

If you feel like you don’t know what you are doing it’s probably because you don’t know what you are doing and that’s bad.

I think this one depends on one's personality. I know people who have been relatively successful in their role for years who still regularly express impostor syndrome.

Yep, agree 100%.

10.6.8 on the early unibody Macbook Pros was excellent.

Your comment made me go back and actually read the FOIA document, and indeed it does read as though the police used an LRAD (presumably at low power) in a manner similar to a loudspeaker to convey information, not in a forceful, damaging manner.